Allow us to introduce Ozarks musicians Mark Bilyeu and Cindy Woolf (The Creek Rocks). The duo are our very first Artists in Resonance, and are here for a week of in-depth research. Mark and Cindy, who live in Springfield, Missouri, were chosen from among 22 applicants to the Center’s Artists in Resonance Fellowship. The fellowship is intended to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the Center’s archives. During their fellowship, Cindy and Mark are focusing on the materials Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded in Missouri in 1936 and 1937 for the Resettlement Administration. According to the duo, the items in the collection from Springfield, despite probably being the earliest audio documents of folk music in and around that city, "seem to be virtually unknown to our local historical memory, save for but a very few figures immersed in the study of the Ozarks and its folklore." Their goal is to produce a full-length album of songs from the collection in new arrangements by The Creek Rocks. In this post you can read more about The Creek Rocks, find links to their work and to the other archival collections they’ve visited, and find out how to apply for future fellowships.
With gratitude and best wishes, the American Folklife Center notes that on September 30, 2024, after more than 40 years on the air, our longtime friend and colleague Fiona Ritchie ended her successful and influential weekly public radio program “The Thistle & Shamrock,” an institution in the Celtic music world. Fiona Ritchie has had close ties over the years with AFC staff members; she has been a guest in our “Open Mic” series of interviews, and two members of the AFC staff were featured on a 2-part “Thistle and Samrock” episode about the AFC’s history for our 40th anniversary in 2016. In this blog post, we pay tribute to Fiona and provide links to those programs.
Rachel Sumner and Traveling Light, a trio from the Boston area playing bluegrass and old time music, are the latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series, in which we include a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. You'll find it all in this post...along with a bonus song video! Singer, multi-instrumentalist, and Lennon Award-winning songwriter Rachel Sumner is a fixture of the Boston roots and Americana scene. She fronts the trio Traveling Light on vocals, guitar and banjo, with Kat Wallace on fiddle and Mike Siegel on upright bass. Together they specialize in applying their deeply rooted bluegrass know-how to new interpretations of traditional folk songs and tightly crafted original songs written by Sumner. The band has previously participated in our Archive Challenge at Folk Alliance International and contributed a song to our special Labor Day presentation in 2003. In this concert they made a special effort to play some songs that are part of the American Folklife Center archive, making this another entry in the Archive Challenge as well.
The latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series features Celtic duo Rakish. As usual, it includes a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. Rakish is made up of violinist Maura Shawn Scanlin and guitarist Conor Hearn. Maura and Conor draw on the music they grew up with and perform it in a way that reflects their shared interest in and love for chamber music as well as improvised music. Maura Shawn, a two-time U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion, and a winner of the Glenfiddich Fiddle Competition, has the technical range of a classical violinist and the sensitivity of a traditional musician. Conor, a native to the Irish music communities of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, makes his home in Boston playing guitar for several traditional music acts and bands. Using musical form and harmonic language as focal points, Rakish demonstrate the influence and overlap between dance music and airs from Britain and Ireland and art music or classical music from surrounding countries. The concert included musical dance forms and tune types including jigs, reels, hornpipes, and airs, arranged from written collections to be performed on the fiddle and guitar. In the interview, we talked about how Rakish prepared for this concert. using musical transcriptions from The American Folklife Center and the Library’s Music Division, including late baroque and early galant music. Watch the concert and interview right in this blog post!
This post looks at photos and recordings of some important calypso stars of the 1940s New York music scene, Macbeth the Great (Patrick MacDonald), Duke of Iron (Cecil Anderson) and Lord Invader (Rupert Grant). The 1947 photos are part of the William P. Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress Music Division, while the recording of a full-length 1946 concert by the three performers is part of the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax Collection. These collections shed light on an interesting time in American music, before the emergence of rock and roll, when calypso and related Caribbean styles were vying for popularity with other folk music genres. In 1944, the Andrews Sisters had a major hit with Lord Invader's "Rum and Coca-Cola." In 1956, Harry Belafonte's "Calypso" became the first million-selling LP record. During the period between those milestones, it looked possible that calypso could emerge to be one of the leading styles of American pop music. Performers like Duke of Iron, Macbeth, and Lord Invader engaged in friendly competitions like the ones documented by Gottlieb and Lomax, using witty lyrics, catchy music, and personal charisma to fascinate audiences on stage and on record. Find the photos and a link to the concert audio in this blog post.
Filed away in the archives of the American Folklife Center is a little piece of radio history in the form of an oral history interview and eleven black and white photographs. The subject of the interview is Burgess Hall, who began playing music with his siblings around the age of eight. In the 1930s, Burgess and several of his friends began performing music at shows in West Virginia and Kentucky. During their three-year stint as the Burgess Hall String Band, they were invited to play several shows in Wheeling, West Virginia, including radio shows "Wheeling Jamboree" and "It's Wheeling Steel." In this guest blog post, AFC folklife specialist Meg Nicholas describes the collection, shows us some of the photos, and reveals a touching connection to her own family.
For many years, the song "Booth" or "Booth Killed Lincoln" has been considered a prime example of a traditional ballad about a historical event. Telling in remarkable detail the story of John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, the ballad seems ripped from contemporary headlines. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who sang the song for the Library of Congress in 1949, has been credited as the song's collector, and many sources indicate a date of about 1890 as the latest possible origin for the song, since Lunsford said he heard his father sing "some of the stanzas" to the fiddle tune "Booth." But is there another possible explanation of the song's origins? In this post, we'll look more closely at Lunsford's various recordings of "Booth," as well as unpublished primary-source and secondary-source evidence in the AFC archive, to try to piece together the birth of "Booth."
It's hard to believe, but this is the 1000th published post here at Folklife Today! To celebrate, we'll talk about one of the songs on the Archive's 1000th disc. It reveals a lot about the history of the archive, the methods of Alan Lomax, and the development of a well known cowboy song. It also introduces us to "Daca," a little-known folksinger active from the 1920s through the 1940s, whom we'll profile in a later post. This track is known as AFS 1000 B2, and is Alan Lomax, then Assistant-in-Charge of the archive, singing "Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle." In the blog you can hear the song, read about where Lomax learned it, find out about its roots in "The Virginian" by novelist Owen Wister, and examine the influence of Lomax's version on the song as it was later sung by cowboys.
The American Folklife Center is kicking off the 2023 Homegrown concert series with a solo performance by banjo player, fiddler, and singer Jake Blount, an award-winning musician and scholar of African American musical traditions. Blount draws on historical sources for his music, including field recordings in the AFC archive. Blount's performance will be part of Live! at the Library and the Black History Month celebrations at the Library of Congress, and is presented in cooperation with the Folklore Society of Greater Washington. The concert is at 6:00 pm in the Members Room (LJ 162) in the historic Thomas Jefferson Building.
